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Booklist Editors Recommend

Darwin’s Radio.

Bear, Greg (author).

Bear posits that humanity’s next evolutionary step could be climbed by means of a disease. In a fascinating story that will please his fans and increase their number, Bear creates an evolutionary agent called scattered human endogenous retrovirus activation, or SHERVA. Wanting a more dramatic name, the Centers for Disease Control takes the R out to make it SHEVA, close to the name of the Hindu god of destruction. As it happens, the new name is uncomfortably apt. The book opens with anthropologist Mitch Rafelson at work on a frozen family of three found in an Alpine cave, all of whom show signs of SHEVA. Meanwhile, microbiologist Kaye Lamb, author of several solid scientific papers on human viruses and maker of some startling predictions, is called to the Republic of Georgia to examine the bodies of some slain men and pregnant women that manifest SHEVA. How did the three bodies get in the Alpine cave? Why were the men and, especially, the pregnant women in Georgia murdered? The slowly disclosed answers to those questions bring Mitch, Kaye, and longtime CDC global virus hunter Christopher Dicken together. SHEVA seems to be carried by a new disease that the CDC has named Herod’s flu, for which there is no vaccine. The victims of Herod’s flu do not have typical flu symptoms, however, for Herod’s is a “hideously inventive disease” that leads to evolutionary changes. Lots of food for thought and nightmares here.  William Beatty